Unfortunately, slides from the talks were not made available, but Scott Lemon provided notes on Peter's talk:
His first point was about Machine Learning ... and joked about the fact that we don't know how to do it. His comments on AI in the Middle included how authors can write trillions of words, systems can detect certain patterns, and intelligent readers can then actually sort through this and find information. He went on to give examples of where apparent intelligence can emerge from larger amounts of data . .. giving examples of the accuracy of Arabic translation based on larger and larger data sets of example translation.There is tremendous potential in this flood of data, an opportunity to extract knowledge from the noise.
I also liked what Jon Udell said in his brief summary:
Google's "AI in the middle" isn't intelligence per se, but rather a clever mediation between intelligent authors and intelligent readers.There is wisdom in that crowd. All we need to do is find it.
See also my previous post, "Zen and the art of Amazon recommendations".